Meet Me in St. Louis

“Meet me in St. Louis, Louis/meet me at the fair,

Don’t tell me the lights are shining/Any place but there”

~ Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland

My husband and I recently went on an anniversary trip to St. Louis, Missouri. Naturally, I dragged my camera with me, especially since it was in the zone of totality for the 2017 solar eclipse. We arrived a few days early and explored some of the more notable tourist spots. Among them was City Museum, an evolving indoor-outdoor artwork-in-progress. We first visited the exhibit on the roof, along with many children and their parents. If you’ve never seen the installation of a school bus or a small airplane on a rooftop before, City Museum is the place to find it, along with fountains, slides, towers to climb, and even a functioning ferris wheel.

Inside, City Museum is full of kid-sized crawl spaces, a huge playroom for toddlers, a room with a large insect collection, and display cabinets full of all sorts of interesting objects like bits and pieces of china dolls, glowing glass bottles, small spitoons, and other assorted knick knacks. Look around you and you may notice stairways adorned with crayola colored tile and seashell-decorated columns.

After the hustle and bustle of City Museum during the daytime, we decided to pay a visit to the famous Gateway Arch in the late afternoon. Turns out the city is doing some construction at the site, but a quick detour around a nearby church brings tourists right up next to the arch and the Mississippi river. Apparently you can grab a helicopter tour of the area if you are so inclined, and there is a tram ride to the top of the arch as well.

The Gateway Arch commemorates St. Louis’s identity as the gateway to the west.

 

The next morning, we visited the Missouri Botanical Garden, which consists of a large system of walking trails and smaller gardens (such as the Japanese gardens and the Victorian gardens) nestled inside it.

That weekend the botanical gardens had extended its special attraction, “Garden of Glass,” glass sculpture by Craig Mitchell Smith, which was featured in the Climatron.

After a lovely weekend of exploring St. Louis, we were fired up and ready to go eclipse-watching! The locals noted that a lot of people were coming into town that weekend and things were a bit busier than usual. We headed out early Monday morning for St. Clair, a town SW of St. Louis, where the solar eclipse would be in totality for at least two minutes. At the outskirts of town, we stopped at a rest stop and noticed that it was a pretty good place to observe the sun. Apparently many other people thought so, too, and soon the driveway was barricaded!

Now, the last time I experienced a total eclipse was 1979, and I was in school at the time. This time, however, I was out with my camera determined to record the event. Next to our car was an amateur astronomer, Curtis, and his wife Maryann. Curtis had two telescopes set up with filters, and in them you could see things like flares on the sun. I was actually surprised at how few people put on viewing glasses and watched as the moon crossed the sun. Mainly everyone was interested in the total eclipse and cheered as it happened. The light slowly began to fade, and you could see Venus and stars in the sky. It was eerie, like twilight light in a planetarium. Frankly, I think the sun’s corona peeping around the moon’s disk was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

I fired off a volley of bracketed shots but took the time to look around me and to hear a confused dog bark. Then, all too soon, it was time to put my filter back on the camera as the moon slid away from the sun. Fortunately, I caught the “diamond ring” in the nick of time.

It’s certainly an experience I won’t forget any time soon! I plan to be ready to try the landscape version of these images in 2024 when the total eclipse comes to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.